I stepped behind the till into a small side room that led off from it and ran my finger up and down the shelves until I found the order slip that said Dundee.
‘Here you go,’ I said, carrying the book round to the front of the shop again. I held it out and only then saw what it was called: The Art of Arousal: A Celebration of Erotic Art Throughout History. There was a painting of a woman having sex with a swan on the cover.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said the man, in a low, clipped tone. ‘Yes. I might have known. It’s Zeus. He transformed himself into a swan and seduced Leda. Quite odd, those gods.’
‘Looks like it,’ I replied, and we both gazed at the book in silence for a few moments before he spoke again.
‘I’m also looking for something else.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, keen to alleviate the awkwardness of discussing bestiality with this handsome blond man.
‘A book called The Struggle. You don’t happen to have it, do you?’
‘Should have, but it’s a novel so it’ll be back through here.’
I waved him into the fiction area after me. The Struggle was a book as fat as a brick, one of the summer’s biggest sellers, partly because the Irish author had given a series of interviews in which he denounced anyone he was asked about. The Prime Minister? A gobshite. The English in general? A load of gobshites. The Queen? A rich gobshite.
I leant over to scan the table of hardback fiction to find a copy, suddenly very aware that the handsome man was behind me and I was wearing my biggest knickers, the ones with an elasticated waist that pulled up to my belly button and gave me a very obvious VPL. Mia had once insisted that I needed ‘to give thongs a chance’ and left a couple at the bottom of my stairs from one of her fashion clients. But when I’d carried them to the safety of my bedroom for further inspection, I couldn’t work out which bit to put my legs through, and when I finally got them on and glanced over my shoulder in the mirror, my bottom looked so exposed, so vast and white and wobbly, that I wondered why anyone wanted that effect anyway. I’d stashed them at the back of my underwear drawer where they’d remained ever since.
I found the book’s gold spine on the edge of the table. ‘Here you go,’ I said, sliding it free and handing it to him. ‘Have you read any of his others?’ I wanted to distract him from my enormous pants.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Should I?’
‘I’ve only read his first one. This is better, but that was good too. A coming-of-age tale. Growing up in Dublin in the Seventies, trying to escape family politics, actual politics and then he…’ I stopped. ‘Well, I won’t give it away. But it’s good, yes,’ I said, blushing as he held my eye.
He turned the book over where, on the back cover, the author, Dermot Dooley, glared up at us.
‘Looks pretty angry with life, doesn’t he?’
I snickered. ‘True.’
Up close, he smelt fresh, of a lemony aftershave. Without moving my head, I raised my eyes from the book to his face. It was as if part of me recognized him. He felt familiar. But if he’d been in here before I would remember it, surely? Eugene and I would have fought to serve him and Eugene was normally quicker than me with the hot ones.
His eyes met mine and I blushed again. Busted.
‘Thanks for finding it. And my mother’s book. You’re brilliant, er…’
‘Florence,’ I said, smiling back at him, ‘and not at all. It’s my job.’
‘Thank you all the same.’
‘You’re into contemporary fiction then?’ I ventured, stepping back behind the till and taking the books from him.
‘Absolutely, when I get the time. Why?’
‘Sorry, nosy of me. Just…’ I stopped. ‘Well, I shouldn’t really say it but most men come in here looking for Wayne Rooney’s autobiography.’
‘Oh Christ,’ he said, clapping a hand to his forehead. ‘That was the other one I was supposed to pick up. Don’t suppose you’ve got a copy?’
I looked up from the till and laughed.
‘What about you?’ he asked.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘What do you read? I suppose I’ve never really thought about it before, but does someone who works in a bookshop have to read all of these?’ He gestured at the shelves.
‘No! Luckily not. We share it. I’m novels. Eugene, that’s my colleague, he takes on non-fiction and plays. There’s a system so that if someone comes in we can help them, er, find a book they fall in love with.’
I felt embarrassed for describing it like that but he didn’t seem to hear because he was concentrating on the cards in front of the till. ‘Sorry, can I chuck these in too?’ He handed me a pack of cards with Vermeer’s Girl in a Pearl Earring on the front, except the woman’s face had been replaced with a cat. It was part of a series of greetings cards that I’d insisted to Norris we should stock. And I’d been right. There had been Mona Lisa as a cat, a Van Gogh self-portrait as a cat and a cat dressed as Holbein’s Henry VIII, but they’d all sold out.
‘You like cats?’ He looked more of a dog person. Wellington boots on the weekend, three Labradors, a tweed hat.
‘I do. My mother has three Persians.’
‘Cute. And altogether that’ll be £36.45 please. Do you want a bag?’
He shook his head. ‘No, not to worry.’
‘But it’s raining,’ I said, nodding towards the windows. Outside, people scuttled under umbrellas like giant black beetles.
He grinned again. ‘A bit of rain won’t hurt.’ He tucked the books and his cards under his arm. ‘Not sure I’m going to fall in love, though,’ he said.
‘Huh?’ I said. I’d been gazing at his chest – at a small triangle of blond hair exposed at the top of his shirt – and misheard.
‘With him,’ the man said, flashing Dooley’s headshot at me again. ‘You said you find books for people to fall in love with.’
‘Right,’ I replied, laughing too loudly. He meant Dooley. Obviously he wasn’t talking about me. Come on, Florence. People don’t go about their lives falling in love with others they meet in bookshops. That only happened once in Notting Hill.
‘Thanks so much for all your help,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ I replied as he made for the door. ‘I hope you enjoy it.’
He held his fingers to his temple, saluting. Then he was gone into the drizzle.
I felt a pang of disappointment at his disappearance but heard Norris coming upstairs, so tried to rearrange my face.
‘Pass us the order book,’ he said, standing on the other side of the counter. I handed it over in silence.
‘You all right?’ he added.
‘Yeah, fine. Why?’
‘Just look a bit flustered. Where’s Eugene?’
‘Upstairs, restocking travel.’
Norris opened the book and reached for a pen.
‘You missed Mrs Delaney,’ I went on.
‘My lucky day. She buy anything?’
‘No. But someone came in to collect an order and I sold another copy of The Struggle.’
Norris blew out heavily through his nostrils. ‘I’m not sure one hardback a day’s going to keep us open. Ah, we’ll see,’ he said, closing the book and handing it back to me.
‘I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve got a plan,’ I said, straightening up and deciding to broach my ideas.
Norris’s eyebrows waggled with suspicion.
‘We need to sort out the website. And I thought about a petition. Online and in here. I’ll get everyone who comes in to sign it.’
He didn’t reply.
‘And we really should have Instagram by now, Norris. I can run it, it’s easy. And Twitter.’
‘Twitter?’ Norris barked it as if it was a dirty word.
‘It’s free marketing, quite literally.’
‘No, no, no,’ he replied, shaking his head as he made for the stairs. ‘Can’t think about all this now. I’ve got enough on as it is.’
I stuck my tongue out at his back. ‘Didn’t want to think about it now’ was always his excuse. It was maddening. And irresponsible.
Then came the noise of Eugene clattering downstairs. He dropped an armful of empty boxes on the floor in front of the till.
‘They can’t stay there,’ I said.
‘Calm down, bossy boots,’ he replied, leaning on the counter and panting. ‘I’m famished. Do you mind if I have first lunch? Not sure I’m going to make it to second.’ Lunches in the shop were divided into first (an hour at twelve thirty) and second (an hour at one thirty), decided between us every day.
‘Nope, you go.’
‘Thanks,’ replied Eugene, yawning and stretching his arms over his head. ‘See you in a bit,’ he said, already halfway through the door before I could shout at him about the boxes.
‘Men,’ I muttered to myself. At home, I lived with two sisters who never put a mug in the dishwasher; in the shop, I worked alongside men who only thought of their stomachs. I wondered which was more trying. Not that long ago, Mrs Delaney had told me that gladioli plants were asexual. Sounded a much easier life, being a gladioli.
As I bent to slide my fingers under the boxes, the doorbell tinkled behind me so I stood up quickly, aware that another customer was being subjected to my bottom. ‘Sorry,’ I said spinning around, ‘I’m just tidy— Oh, hello.’
It was the man in the braces.
‘Hello again,’ he said, grinning. His hair was damp and there were dark spots on his shirt front from the rain. ‘I only… Well, I hope you don’t mind… The thing is I don’t go around London asking women I meet in shops this, but I wondered if you might be free, or might be interested, in perhaps having a coffee with me?’
‘A coffee?’ I repeated, as if I didn’t know what coffee was.
‘Or a drink,’ he said. ‘Whatever you like. I’d just like to talk to you more about books, if you wanted?’ He ran a hand through the wet strands of his hair and looked expectantly at me.
‘Er…’ I was so surprised by his reappearance that, as if witness to a baffling magic trick, I went mute.
‘If you can’t, or don’t want to, or if you’re taken and don’t for some reason wear a wedding ring – it’s often very hard to tell these days – then forget I ever asked and I’ll never come in here again. Although that would be a shame since it’s a splendid bookshop. But if none of those things apply then I would like very much to buy you some sort of beverage – hot or cold, it’s entirely up to you.’
‘Er…’ I started again, willing my brain into action. ‘Yes, lovely,’ I said, over the top of the boxes. It was only two feeble words but it was better than no words.
‘Good. I was hoping you’d say that. What’s your number?’ He reached into his trousers and pulled out his phone.
Number, I told myself, you can do this. I duly read it out to him.
‘Marvellous,’ he said, pocketing his phone. ‘I’ll text you. Maybe this weekend?’
‘Lovely,’ I said again, feeling dazed.
‘It’s a date,’ he said. ‘See you soon.’
‘See you soon,’ I repeated, although he was already gone. I dropped the boxes on top of the fiction table and exhaled slowly, then squinted at my reflection in the window pane. Did I look different today? Was my hair less like a spaniel’s?
‘Florence, duck, you know those shouldn’t be there,’ said Norris, appearing on the stairs again and pointing at the boxes. ‘Put them out the back, please.’
I didn’t even protest that, actually, it was Eugene’s fault for abandoning the boxes and I was moving them for him. I just did it.
And it was only while flattening them with my feet in the stockroom that I realized two things: firstly, I didn’t even know the man’s name. And secondly, Gwendolyn’s list! I froze and my hands flew to my cheeks as I remembered what I’d written. He was a tall, absurdly attractive and seemingly funny man who read books, liked cats and clearly didn’t think a drop of rain was going to kill him. But that had to be a coincidence?
Course it was. I laughed and shook my head as I started stamping down the boxes again. As if the universe had anything to do with it. Obviously it was a coincidence. There was no way that lunatic in her daisy dungarees had sent that beautiful man in here.
I had a NOMAD meeting that evening so I left Eugene to lock up and walked to the primary school where they were held, a few streets from the shop. Peering through the classroom porthole, I saw my friend Jaz already sitting in one of the child-sized plastic seats. A man I didn’t recognize had folded himself into a front-row seat and was scowling at the finger paintings. We were a small group, normally about eight or nine, and we sat in rows surrounded by colourful finger paintings and art made from pasta. At the front, under a large whiteboard, our leader Stephen would try and encourage a sensible group discussion while we ate custard creams. It was always custard creams. Stephen brought them himself, along with a travel kettle, several mugs and tea supplies.
I pushed open the door. ‘Hi, Stephen,’ I said, waving at him.
He spun around from his plate of biscuits and beamed at me. ‘Good evening, Florence. All well?’
‘All pretty brilliant, actually,’ I said, dropping my bag on the small red seat next to Jaz. Her 4-year-old, Duncan, was sitting cross-legged on the floor in his sweatshirt and school trousers, earplugs in, watching a video on her phone. ‘How come Dunc’s here?’
Jaz sighed. ‘Because his dad’s a premier league asshole who didn’t make pick-up.’
She said this loudly enough to make Stephen’s shoulders twitch. Dunc, fortunately, was too engrossed with his phone to overhear. I ruffled his hair and he looked up and grinned happily before dropping his gaze back to the screen.
Jaz’s ex, Dunc’s father, was a plumber called Leon. He and Jaz had been together for a few months when she got pregnant. She’d presented him with the happy news only for Leon to admit that, actually, Jaz wasn’t the only woman whose pipes he was seeing to. They’d split and Leon had been a sporadic father ever since. Occasionally he’d take him to the Battersea zoo to see the rabbits and the frogs (Dunc, very into animals, wanted to be a vet when he grew up), but he and Jaz were generally on bad terms.
Dunc was the reason she’d started coming to these meetings. Jaz was a hairdresser who worked in a Chelsea salon but, when he was a baby, she’d started obsessing about his food: his food and her food. She panicked that he’d eat or swallow something – a crisp or a grape – that had been contaminated by her own hands with chemicals from the salon. She began to only eat food with a knife and fork, and nothing could touch her fingers at any stage of the cooking process, which had drastically shrunk her diet.
By the time she started coming to the meetings on the advice of her GP, she was only eating ready meals since she could just peel off the cellophane. Ready meals for breakfast, ready meals for lunch, ready meals for supper. It was the same for Dunc – a 2-year-old reared almost exclusively on Bird’s Eye. When I joined the group a few months on, Jaz (and Dunc) had graduated from just ready meals to ready meals along with pasta and vegetables so long as they came in a frozen bag and she didn’t have to touch them before cooking. Now, she let them eat most things, apart from fruit by hand, but she still came along every other week so we could whisper in the back row. We made an unlikely pair – me, the bookish 32-year-old in ugly shoes and Jaz, the forty-something hairdresser always wearing animal print – but we’d become close. Although outwardly very different, we both knew what it was like to feel as if we’d lost control of our own brains, as if we were being operated by an internal puppeteer constantly giving us pointless and exhausting tasks.
‘You all right?’ I checked, looking from Dunc on the floor to Jaz. Today she was wearing a white T-shirt over a pair of snakeskin leggings.
She sighed again. ‘Yeah, just dead as a dingo.’ Jaz often confused her expressions. A couple of weeks ago she’d complained to Stephen of feeling as if she was between ‘a sock and a hard place’.<
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‘Dodo,’ I corrected.
‘One full colour and three perms today. Three! Honestly, these women. What were they thinking? And then I had to rush to school to get this one.’ She nodded at Dunc and I glanced at the phone screen to see he was watching some sort of nature documentary, a lioness tearing into the hind leg of an unlucky zebra.
‘What’s going on with you though?’ she added. ‘Why the good mood?’
I didn’t immediately answer. I just smiled at her.
Jaz leant forward in her small seat. ‘Why you looking like that?’
‘Got asked out today.’ I’d been bursting to tell Eugene all afternoon but every time I nearly did, the door would ring and someone else came in to escape the rain.
‘What d’you mean? By a guy?’
‘Yes! Thank you very much for looking so astonished.’
Jaz whooped and jumped up, clapping with delight. ‘Serious? You going?’
‘Everything all right, Jasmine?’ Stephen looked up from his custard creams. He was a man almost as round as he was tall who could have been mistaken for an IT teacher – short grey hair, black glasses, always wore short-sleeved shirts with a tie. Nerdy but kind. He saw himself as a south London shepherd, trying to help his flock every other week with a ninety-minute discussion and biscuits.
‘All fine, Stephen, don’t you worry,’ said Jaz. ‘Just found out that your woman here’s got a date.’
I hissed as I sat. ‘Shhhhhh, not everyone needs to know.’
‘My congratulations to Florence,’ said Stephen. ‘And, Jasmine, as you’re clearly so full of beans, you can be today’s tea monitor.’
Jaz winked at me and headed for Stephen’s kettle, plugged in in the corner behind the classroom sandpit. I fished my phone from my bag. No message yet but it was probably too soon.
I put my phone face down in my lap and looked around as the others started arriving. Notable members of our group included Mary, a middle-aged accountant who had a phobia of buttons; Elijah, who ran a nearby dry cleaners and was obsessed with conspiracy theories; Lenka, a nurse who suffered hypochondria, and Seamus, a Dubliner who’d been diagnosed as a compulsive hoarder and lived in a Pimlico flat full of newspapers that dated back to the Sixties. The council was trying to kick him out but Seamus kept coming up with legal reasons to stop them.
The Wish List: Escape with the most hilarious and feel-good read of 2020! Page 5