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

by Sophia Money-Coutts

I shook my head. ‘I’m sort of waiting for the right moment. I just… didn’t want it to seem too much.’

  Mia rolled her eyes. ‘You’re fine, you’ve just been to stay with his parents.’

  ‘He must come,’ added Hugo, ‘it’ll be like having the abominable snowman or the Loch Ness Monster there.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Only that they’re also exceptionally rare beasts, a bit like your boyfriends, ha ha!’

  Mia punched Hugo in the arm and made him whine again.

  ‘Oh hey, would your friend Jaz be up for doing our hair?’ she went on. ‘I’ve booked a make-up artist called Mel so that’s sorted. She’s amazing, she did the Royal wedding. But I still need someone to do hair.’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘You, Ruby, Mum and me. I’ve got a mood board. Look.’ She reached for her laptop so I quickly picked up my suitcase again. Couldn’t face looking at 742 different hairstyles right now.

  ‘I’ve got to go unpack all my knickers,’ I said, ‘but I’ll text her and ask.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘A WORD, PLEASE, EVERYONE!’ shouted Norris a few days later, as he stood in the middle of the shop just before opening.

  I looked over my shoulder and caught Eugene’s eye. He frowned at me; I shrugged back. Zach appeared at the top of the stairs and yawned, stretching his tattooed arms. A bird with unfurled wings flew up his right bicep, so delicately inked you could see every feather.

  ‘Morning, madam,’ said Zach mid-yawn, his arms still lifted. ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘Put your hand over your mouth,’ I replied, walking past him towards the others.

  ‘Is everything OK, Norris?’ said Eugene. He was wearing his silliest bow tie, pink with yellow spots. It made him look like the host of a children’s game show.

  ‘Eugene, Eugene, calm down,’ said Norris, waving a hand in the air as if he was trying to slow traffic. ‘It’s only to say thank you, again, for the evening last week and any more ideas would be gratefully received since the landlord’s not budging on the rent. So we need more. More money, more support.’

  ‘More readings?’ suggested Eugene. ‘I’ve been looking at the catalogues and there’s a new cookery book by Marigold Shute coming out in the next couple of weeks called How to Have a Very Merry Vegan Christmas.’

  ‘Christ on a bike, not the nut-munchers,’ muttered Norris.

  ‘I’m not interviewing anybody,’ I warned.

  ‘And there’s a new Hitler biography by Simon Friedman,’ added Eugene.

  ‘Another one?’ I asked. ‘How is there anything left to say that the last 592 books about him haven’t?’

  ‘Hitler’s a crowd-puller,’ insisted Eugene.

  ‘Steady on,’ said Norris, waving his hand at him again. ‘But he does sell tickets so can you look into it?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about children’s events,’ said Zach, leaning back against the shelves. ‘Hallowe’en is in a couple of weeks, then Christmas.’

  ‘Zachary, why would I want a stampede of kids dribbling from every orifice in this shop?’ asked Norris.

  ‘Because if you get the kids, you get the parents. Look, say we do a Hallowe’en party, a tenner a ticket per kid, string up fake cobwebs downstairs in the children’s section, do a couple of spooky readings, get a face painter. Job done. Meanwhile, the adults are stuck here for an hour or so. They’re going to buy books.’

  ‘You’ll probably just get a load of nannies.’

  Zach rolled his eyes at me. ‘Don’t be a grinch. It’s what we should be doing. More community stuff, local stuff. And it’s good for our social channels. We get tagged in pictures, word spreads. Every little helps.’

  ‘If you want to do local stuff, what about my petition?’ I said, looking at Norris. ‘A proper campaign against the rent hike. And posters in the windows. That’s got to be more helpful than some fake cobwebs.’

  ‘Spoilsport,’ muttered Zach.

  ‘Don’t worry, I love fancy dress,’ said Eugene, patting his arm. ‘I’ll be there in my pumpkin outfit.’

  ‘Alternatively you could go as a toad,’ I suggested, peeved by Eugene’s open act of disloyalty.

  ‘We can do both,’ said Norris, adopting the tone of a UN peacekeeper. ‘Zachary, you can be in charge of events. Let’s see how Hallowe’en goes before committing to any others. But I do not want to see a drop of fake blood anywhere. If I see a drop of fake blood there could be a very real accident, all right?’

  Zach nodded.

  ‘Florence, you may start your petition, but can you run it past me before you get any placards made up?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to get plac—’

  ‘It was a little joke,’ said Norris. ‘And Eugene, can you please approach Hitler and the cabbage brigade about readings?’

  ‘Yes, Norris, right away.’

  ‘Good, thank you. Can someone open up? I’m going back downstairs if anyone needs me.’

  There was a NOMAD meeting that night, so I locked up and walked round the corner. ‘Hi, Stephen,’ I said, pushing the classroom door open. He waved from the teacher’s desk at the front where he was fanning out his custard creams. Mary was already in her seat at the front. Seamus, the hoarder, was making tea in the corner. I was always nervous about Seamus being on tea duty because he didn’t inspire much confidence on the hygiene front; today he was wearing a coat fastened with orange twine.

  ‘How you doing, babe?’ Jaz asked, as I took my usual seat next to her. ‘Saw those pictures of you with the dog.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I replied. ‘It was a complete disaster. All Zach’s fault.’

  ‘Is Zach the good-looking one?’

  ‘Not you as well?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ruby was all over him last week too.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind him climbing all over me,’ said Jaz, with a wheezy laugh that attracted Stephen’s attention.

  ‘Jasmine and Florence, I wonder if you two would like to sit at the front this week?’

  ‘No, ta, Stephen. We’re all right here.’

  ‘If you say so,’ he replied, before turning back to his biscuits.

  ‘No Dunc?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah. Leon picked him up for once.’

  ‘All fine there?’

  Jaz shrugged. ‘I handed over Dunc and his school bag, we didn’t say much.’ She paused and chewed a nail. ‘I dunno what he’ll give him for his tea.’

  ‘He’ll be OK, it’s one night.’ It felt feeble reassurance but I didn’t know what else to add. And to be fair to Leon, Dunc had only eaten from sterile jars of baby mush for the first two years of his life. One night of nuggets wasn’t going to hurt.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jaz went on, her face brightening, ‘how’s it going with that fancy boyfriend of yours?’

  ‘Fancy?’

  She turned in her seat and squinted at me. ‘I thought you said he wears posh clothes?’

  ‘Oh, right, yes, and good, thanks. Stayed with his parents this weekend. Got caught shagging in the vegetable garden by his dad. The usual.’

  ‘What?’ she said, loudly enough for Stephen to glance over his shoulder at us.

  ‘Yeah, he’s quite keen on sex,’ I whispered.

  ‘You had that on that mad list of yours.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something about James Bond. And now you’ve got yourself a right pervert.’ She laughed loudly at this.

  ‘Shhhhhh.’

  ‘Have you been back to see that old witch?’ she asked, at the same volume.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘And what did she say about it?’

  I winced, already embarrassed by what I was about to admit. ‘She put a spell on my necklace.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘A spell for attraction, to transform my energy and make Rory fall in love with me. Or something like that.’

  Jaz’s head dropped back and she cackled at the ceiling.

  ‘Jasmine!’ said Stephen. ‘
As we’ll be starting in a few moments, are you sure I can’t persuade you to sit up here?’ He gestured at the front row, where Lenka had now joined Mary and was coughing into a handkerchief.

  ‘No, no, we’re all right,’ Jaz insisted, before looking at me. ‘I’m sorry, Floz, I shouldn’t laugh. But it is funny, all this. Forget your caterpillar book. Are you writing all this down?’

  ‘Isn’t it weird though? That everything’s happened like she said?’

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘Nah, not really. It’s what you want to believe, innit?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Seamus shuffled in front of us, holding two mugs of tea so dark it looked like coffee.

  ‘Thanks, Seamus,’ I said, reaching for one handle, trying not to look at his dirty fingernails.

  ‘You’re the man,’ said Jaz, taking the other mug before breezing on. ‘Look, Floz, it’s like your counting and me thinking all my food was dangerous. And you thinking you’ve met Rory because of this list. It’s our brains persuading us that it must be true. It’s how them fortune tellers work.’

  I frowned at her.

  ‘By winkling out people’s weak spots and convincing them that only they know the truth.’

  ‘When it isn’t true?’

  She shrugged. ‘Could eating an apple really hurt Dunc? Nah, course not. But I had a little whispery voice telling me it might. And same with you, right? Did you meet Rory because you wrote a list of things you were looking for?’

  I didn’t reply. I wasn’t sure what I believed now.

  Jaz shook her head. ‘Nah. But you wanted a boyfriend and he happened to come into the shop one day, so you’ve persuaded yourself that it’s because of this list. It’s clever, man. It’s easy to believe, just be careful.’

  ‘With Rory?’

  ‘With everything. Don’t let anyone push you in the wrong direction. You’ve got to think for yourself.’

  I sighed and decided to change the subject. I could feel Jaz’s advice acting like a depressant, deflating the excitement I felt about even being in a relationship.

  ‘Talking of the shop,’ I said, ‘can I talk to you about making a petition?’ Jaz had organized one a couple of years before when the council tried to demolish the red-brick block she lived in at the end of the King’s Road.

  ‘Petition?’

  ‘For Frisbee. To make the landlord back down on the rent. He only put it up last year and now he’s trying to do it again.’

  ‘You should do what we did.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘We put up a table on the street one weekend and got nearly two thousand signatures. And the local MP came and took photos. And we had stickers…’

  ‘Stickers!’ I hadn’t thought of stickers. ‘Did it help?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m still living there, aren’t I? I’ll help if you want. I quite like all that. A cause. In the olden times I could have been Joan of the Ark.’

  ‘Joan of Arc.’

  ‘Yeah, her.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I murmured. ‘We could have a table outside the shop and I’ll get a banner made up. I just need to beat Zach.’

  ‘Beat him?’

  ‘He’s doing a Hallowe’en party to raise money.’

  ‘Top idea! Can I bring Dunc?’

  I tutted. ‘Yeah, all right.’ Then I remembered Mia’s hair request. ‘Oh, also, you up for doing our hair on my sister’s wedding day?’

  ‘Sure. When is it?’

  ‘First Saturday in December. It’ll be me and Ruby who are the bridesmaids. Plus my stepmum and the—’

  ‘JASMINE AND FLORENCE,’ shouted Stephen from the front. ‘As we’re about to start, I’m going to insist today that you both sit here.’ He gestured at the seats directly in front of his desk.

  ‘All right, Steve, keep your hair on,’ said Jaz, peeling her bottom out of the chair and picking up her bag. ‘Come on, Floz. You got us in trouble with Stephen.’

  The following morning, I downloaded a petition template and personalized it at the till computer while Eugene tidied the customer orders in the cupboard behind me, singing hymns as he went.

  ‘Save our local bookshop!’ I typed in big red letters at the top of the document, followed by a short paragraph explaining that we needed support to force our landlord to back down on the rent increase. Initially, I wrote ‘evil landlord’ but deleted it on the basis that it was a petty barb that made the petition sound less professional.

  Zach had come upstairs looking for the stapler earlier and peered over my shoulder before offering to help with the design, but I had primly refused him. The petition was my job. And it looked very official; neat little rectangular boxes for printed names, signatures and email addresses. I felt proud. The suffragettes might have handcuffed themselves to the Downing Street railings but I’d mastered Excel. Both were impressive in their own way.

  ‘How many sheets do you think we need?’ I asked Eugene over my shoulder.

  He paused from a verse of ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’.

  ‘How many signatures can you get on each one?’

  ‘Mmm… about thirty,’ I said, scrolling down the computer.

  His head popped out from the cupboard like a mole. ‘Maybe a hundred?’

  ‘A hundred sheets? Norris will go mad.’ The printer was downstairs in his office. Eugene used to print his lines from it until Norris appeared on the shop floor one morning, eyes like a dragon and clutching fistfuls of paper, demanding to know which of us had printed the entire text of Othello.

  ‘Just do it when he goes for lunch,’ Eugene said with a shrug, before returning to the cupboard and resuming his singing.

  I hit print just after Norris left for The Duck and Sausage (he had lunch at the nearby pub every day: a pint of ale and a pickled egg sandwich), and I left it a few minutes before going downstairs to the office.

  Zach spun from his laptop and gestured at the printer where dozens of pages had fluttered to the floor and more were spilling out of it, page after page. ‘You aiming for the whole of London to sign this?’

  ‘I don’t want to run out of sheets on Saturday,’ I said, sucking my stomach in and stepping into the tight space between the printer and the back of his chair. I had decided, and Norris had grunted his assent, that this weekend was a good time to erect a table outside the shop and start bagging signatures. The forecast was clear and it was half-term, so I figured families might be out shopping.

  ‘How many did you print?’

  ‘A hundred.’

  Zach swivelled round, the back of his chair pressing my bottom into the filing cabinet, and picked up a few sheets from the floor. ‘You must have done more than that, look.’ He held up a sheet which had the number ‘178’ in the top right-hand corner.

  I checked the next sheet out of the printer: 241. And the sheets didn’t look like they were supposed to. The table was the wrong way round and the signatures boxes had pushed the spaces for email addresses off the page. How had I done this? Fucking Excel. Norris would explode. He was always telling us that ink cartridges were more expensive than gold.

  ‘Shit,’ I muttered, biting my lip at Zach. ‘I don’t know. Stop it, can we stop it?’ I hit the printer’s red button multiple times but the printer kept churning them out, the pages now spooling out and covering my feet. ‘Shit, Zach! And the layout’s all messed up, there’s no space on each one for email addresses. The whole lot’s useless. Shit, what a waste. How do I make it stop? Zach, don’t just laugh, help!’

  ‘Calm down,’ he said, standing up. ‘And budge up.’

  I bent myself underneath the sloped ceiling as Zach tapped at a few buttons on the machine and it stopped instantly.

  ‘What’s going on?’ barked Norris, appearing in the doorway.

  ‘Thought you’d gone for lunch,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Forgot something I needed to post.’ He glared at the floor, a sea of A4. ‘What’s all this paper?’

  ‘It’s the pet
ition which Florence has very kindly spent all morning working on to help you,’ said Zach, in the calming tone that you’d use on a child. ‘Is that OK?’

  Norris reached for an envelope from his desk. ‘Yes, yes, fine.’ He stuck out his chin to peer at one of the sheets.

  ‘Go and have lunch, we’ll show you when you’re back,’ Zach said, ushering him out. Then he turned back to me, scrabbling around in his Doc Martens, picking up the wasted sheets. ‘Email me the document. I’ll print it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said meekly, standing up and feeling child-like myself. Hateful, hateful Excel.

  The printer wasn’t my only challenge that week. On Friday evening, I traipsed along Harley Street, walked up four floors and knocked on Gwendolyn’s door.

  I waited for her summoning.

  Nothing.

  I knocked again.

  Nothing.

  I knocked for a third time and cracked the door open. I didn’t want to interrupt any poor, embarrassed soul lying on the sofa while they had a spell put on them.

  But instead of anybody lying on the sofa, I was greeted by the sight of Gwendolyn dancing around the room in a pair of large pink headphones, wafting a bunch of burning twigs over her head. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of very strong sweet tea.

  ‘Gwendolyn?’

  She didn’t hear me.

  ‘Gwendolyn?’

  ‘Oh girls, they wanna have fu-hunnnnn…’ she sang, still with her back to me. She side-stepped into the corner, her bottom swinging side to side as she waved the twigs like a rhythmic gymnast twirling a ribbon in the air.

  ‘GWENDOLYN!’

  The bottom froze and she frowned over her shoulder, then tugged her headphones off.

  ‘Florence, hello, you’re very early.’

  I looked at my watch. It was 6.32 p.m., which meant I was two minutes late.

  ‘No, it’s, er, gone six thirty.’

  ‘Has it?’ Gwendolyn squinted at her watch as if I was lying to her. ‘Goodness me, so it has. Right, let me just sort myself out and we’ll get cracking.’

  She unclipped an old Walkman from the waistband of her patchwork trousers, then dropped the twigs into a small ceramic bowl on the coffee table.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked. The room smelled like a hippie’s armpit.