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

by Sophia Money-Coutts

  ‘Your wish is my command,’ I said, as I checked my phone and saw a message from Ruby asking for Zach’s number. I ignored it and slid it back into my pocket. She’d have to wait until I’d eaten forty million calories for lunch.

  Fortunately, that afternoon was less eventful. I bleated at a few more shoppers. ‘Could you sign our petition? No more rent rises! Save Frisbee Books!’ Some refused to meet my eye and slid past as if we were buskers on the Tube, rattling a bucket at them. ‘Just a name! All we need is a signature to save our bookshop! Just a name!’ I persisted. Older people were better than youth. At one point, Mrs Delaney wobbled towards us on her stick and stopped to sign, but she wanted to use her fountain pen and upended her handbag on the table before she found it. She scrawled her signature in spidery letters as Zach appeared outside and offered yet another round of tea.

  ‘Is this your husband?’ Mrs Delaney asked Jaz, peering up at Zach from behind her spectacles.

  Jaz shook her head. ‘No, sadly not. But that is my son.’

  This confused Mrs Delaney so she announced she was going inside to have a look at the books.

  That was just before a small girl in a pink anorak ran up to the table.

  ‘Hello,’ said Jaz. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Maya and I’ll be seven soon,’ she said proudly.

  ‘Seven! Goodness gracious me. You’ll be driving a car next.’

  A harassed man appeared behind her. ‘Maya, you can’t run off like that. Sorry,’ he added, looking apologetically at Jaz.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she replied. ‘D’you want to sign the petition? It’s for saving the bookshop.’

  ‘Er, yes, go on then,’ he said, picking up a pen with a shy smile.

  He had a completely smooth face, as if he’d never had to shave, and sandy-coloured hair that stuck up in tufts. But as he bent to sign, I noticed Jaz gazing at him with the tenderness of a doughnut addict walking past a bakery.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, straightening up and holding out the pen.

  ‘No wife around to sign it?’ Jaz asked.

  He looked embarrassed. ‘No, er, no wife.’

  ‘Or girlfriend?’ she persisted, which made me want to spontaneously combust with embarrassment and laugh at the same time. Jaz’s boldness was one of the reasons I loved her; I just couldn’t imagine being like it myself.

  ‘Nope, er, no girlfriend either,’ he replied, with a nervous chuckle.

  ‘He needs a girlfriend,’ came a small voice beside him, and we all looked down at Maya.

  ‘Shhh, Maya, that’s quite enough. Come on, better go home.’ His hairless cheeks had turned quite pink.

  ‘But you do,’ she persisted. ‘Mum said if you had a girlfriend it would make life much easier.’

  The man’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Oh, did she now? When did she tell you that?’

  Maya looked down at her trainers. ‘I just heard her say that on the phone,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, grimacing at us before taking his small daughter’s hand. ‘Right, Maya, we’re going to catch the bus and discuss your habit of eavesdropping on adult conversations. Good luck with the shop,’ he said over his shoulder as he led her back down the street.

  ‘George Spencer,’ Jaz said dreamily, once they were out of sight.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He’s called George Spencer, look.’

  She pointed at the last scrawl on the list of signatures and ran her finger along the box to where he’d printed his email address in neat capital letters. ‘Do you think I can email him?’

  ‘What about?’

  Jaz tutted. ‘Florence Fairfax, this is why you were single for so long. To ask him out! Didn’t you think he was cute?’

  ‘Him?’ I exclaimed loudly. ‘That guy? The human seal?’

  She tutted again. ‘Don’t be horrid about my future husband.’

  I frowned at her. ‘I think it might be illegal, taking someone’s email address from a petition and asking them out. Data protection or something.’

  ‘Rubbish. What’s that thing they say? Fortune favours the old.’

  ‘Bold.’

  ‘Oh, I always thought it was an age thing. Like, we all get luckier as we get older because, like, we know more?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nope, definitely bold.’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m going to email him. I thought he looked nice.’

  ‘What about her mother?’

  She frowned at me.

  ‘Maya’s mother. Sounded a bit complicated.’

  ‘Oh that,’ Jaz said airily. ‘I think it sounded over. Don’t worry, Floz, leave it to me.’

  I stayed silent, just hoping that this wouldn’t end up like the Solihull situation a few months earlier.

  An hour later, having taken a photograph of George’s email address on her phone, she and Dunc went home. I folded up the table as the sun dropped, taking the shoppers with it.

  ‘How many names do you think you got?’ asked Zach, helping me downstairs.

  ‘Nearly a thousand,’ I said as I tried to manoeuvre the table round the banisters. ‘How many do you reckon we need for the landlord to take any notice?’

  ‘Well, the petition to stay in Europe got six million.’

  ‘I feel like that’s ambitious.’

  He laughed as we dropped the table in the stockroom and went back upstairs where Eugene was cashing up.

  ‘Fancy a drink?’ said Zach. ‘I thought we might need one after today so I shoved a few beers in the fridge.’

  Eugene tutted. ‘I’ve got an audition in the morning so I need to get home and practise.’

  ‘Florence, you up for it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, although I felt nervous. Just me and Zach was weird; I didn’t have the energy to bicker for an hour but I couldn’t back out now. I looked at my watch. It had just gone six. I’d stay for one beer and ring Rory to see where he was.

  ‘Great, I’ll grab ’em, hang on.’

  ‘What’s this audition for?’ I asked Eugene, as Zach thumped downstairs again.

  ‘Hamlet. I won’t get it.’

  ‘Don’t be so down on yourself. What part you auditioning for?’

  ‘Hamlet.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, my darling, but have fun. See you Monday.’

  He rushed out and, since Zach still hadn’t reappeared with the beers, I stood at the top of the stairs and shouted for him.

  ‘Let’s have them down here,’ he shouted back.

  I found him standing by the fridge. ‘Here you go,’ he said, handing me a bottle. ‘Shall we sit?’ He nodded towards the beanbags in the kids’ section.

  ‘There?’

  ‘Yeah, I can’t stand up any more today. Come on.’ He led me through and fell back on a beanbag, groaning, before reaching up to knock his bottle against mine. ‘Cheers, partner.’

  ‘Cheers.’ I sat down beside him and took a slug.

  Zach sighed. ‘That might be the best beer I’ve ever had.’

  ‘It’s good,’ I agreed, wishing I could think of something else to say. This was an odd situation. We were sitting on red beanbags, surrounded by children’s books, a life-size cut-out of Wally in his red and white top, and Hallowe’en decorations, which Zach had put up ahead of the party. Fake cobwebs, pumpkin bunting, fake spiders.

  ‘So,’ I said, unable to bear the silence for another second. ‘Patagonia?’

  He raised his eyebrows at me.

  ‘You want to go to Patagonia?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Wanted to for ages.’

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘To photograph the mountains, mostly, but the animals too. You get orcas at the right time of year. And you ever heard of a commerson's dolphin?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s like a penguin shagged a dolphin. They’re black and white. I’d love to see them. And you get amazing eagles. The biggest eagle in the world was from there. Six-metr
e wings.’ He paused and stretched his arms out, the beer bottle dangling from his fingers. ‘Six metres. Can you imagine? It’s extinct now but, still, I want to go.’ Another slug of his bottle. ‘You travelled much?’

  ‘Nope, I’d like to. I’ve just… always been working.’ It was an easy excuse. I didn’t want to admit to him of all people that the furthest I’d travelled was to a small French village full of apricot trees, that I was too nervous about exploring anywhere else.

  ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘Plan?’

  ‘Yeah. You know, what do you want to do, where do you want to go? Or will you stay here forever?’

  ‘What I really want to do…’ I started, before pausing, afraid of admitting it out loud.

  He frowned at me. ‘What?’

  ‘I’d really like to get my children’s book published.’

  ‘You write kids’ stuff?’

  I looked down and pushed my thumbnail under the label of the bottle. ‘I’m trying to. Why? Is that surprising?’

  ‘No, you’ve just never mentioned it. What’s it about?’

  I raised my eyes and winced at him. ‘I’ll tell you but you can’t laugh.’

  Zach smiled and swigged at his beer.

  ‘Look! You’re laughing already and I haven’t even told you!’

  He shook his head and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before replying. ‘I’m not laughing. It’s excitement at hearing about your magnum opus. Come on, tell me.’

  I took a breath. ‘OK, it’s called The Caterpillar Who Couldn’t Stop Counting.’

  He grinned again.

  ‘No laughing!’

  ‘I’m not. What’s the storyline? Hit me with it.’

  ‘It’s…’ Then I stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, it’s about a caterpillar who has twenty feet, and he’s late to school every day because he has to count all his shoes. Every day he has to count all his shoes on and count them off again, and every day it takes him ages and it makes him late, which means he’s in trouble with his teacher. And once he’s at school he has to count everything else – his pencils, the number of chairs in the classroom, all the rucksacks. And everybody else in his class thinks he’s a weirdo so nobody plays with him. But Curtis, he’s the caterpillar, is too embarrassed to admit that he just has this… thing about counting. It just makes him feel better. And then one day, his teacher, who’s a butterfly called Mrs Flutterby, overhears him counting in the playground and asks him about it, and he tells her that he can’t help it, he just has to count everything he sees. And Mrs Flutterby asks if he wants to know a secret. And Curtis nods because obviously everyone wants to know a secret. So she tells him that he has obviously been born with a special superpower for counting, and it’s nothing to feel ashamed of or worry about. That he should be proud of it. And suddenly Curtis is the hero of his class for having this superpower and then once he tells everyone he…’ I paused. Zach hadn’t said a word during this speech.

  ‘Go on,’ he urged.

  ‘He realizes that once it’s out in the open he doesn’t feel like he needs to count so much. I mean, I’ve still got a few bits to work out, but that’s the gist,’ I said, flicking the label with my nail again, embarrassed at having spluttered it all out. The story sounded better in my head.

  ‘So it’s you.’

  ‘Huh?’ I said, looking up from the bottle as if this idea had never occurred to me.

  ‘Curtis is you.’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘Is it obvious?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. I hear you sometimes, putting away books or coming downstairs. I quite like it. “Oh, here comes Florence in her enormous work shoes…”’

  ‘Stop it! You can’t laugh at my mental habit and my shoes!’

  ‘Sorry, but those shoes are the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.’ Then his face turned serious. ‘Why the counting?’

  I inhaled and held the air in my chest before replying. ‘Because I always have done. Ever since I was little. It’s a comfort blanket.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Since I was four. When I could count. My mum died and my stepmother arrived and… it just started.’

  He nodded slowly and grinned again. ‘Do you do anything else weird?’

  It made me laugh. ‘No! Just that. What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Do you have any weird habits?’

  He gestured at his arms. ‘Do tattoos count?’

  From here, I could see the bird flying up his right arm, and, on the left, the muscled legs of a man in winged sandals sticking out from underneath his T-shirt sleeve. ‘What’s the bird?’ I asked, pointing at it.

  He glanced down and rubbed his fingers across its feathers. ‘An owl.’ He raised his eyes to mine. ‘It was Athene’s.’

  I frowned, unsure about whether this Athene woman was a family member or perhaps even an ex. The thought of that was weird; Zach hadn’t ever talked about his personal life.

  ‘She was the Greek goddess of wisdom and war,’ he explained. ‘And an owl was her bird…’

  ‘Like Hedwig in Harry Potter?’ I said quickly, wanting to cover up the fact I’d assumed Athene was an ex-girlfriend.

  Zach grinned. ‘Kind of. Her owl symbolizes wisdom, and sat on Athene’s right shoulder, her blind side, so she could see the whole truth. So that’s why she’s here, on my right arm.’

  I nodded slowly, ashamed that my classics knowledge was so feeble.

  ‘What about that one?’ I asked, nodding at the legs of the man in winged sandals.

  ‘This is Perseus,’ said Zach, smoothing his hand over his other arm.

  I winced at him, uncertain about the name again.

  ‘The Greek hero who killed Medusa. You know, the gorgon who had snakes for hair?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I replied, recalling a childhood book of Greek myths and a woman with a green face and serpents twisting around her head.

  ‘Perseus killed her and then a sea monster called Cetus,’ went on Zach.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did he kill them?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Why do you think? For the love of a beautiful woman.’

  He grinned as I blushed. ‘But why did you pick him?’ I said quickly, trying to cover my coyness.

  ‘It was my favourite story when I was younger. Mum’s a teacher. I told you that, right?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, but that’s kind of all I know. What’s your deal? All I really know is that you’re Norris’s mysterious nephew.’

  Zach sucked in a breath. ‘Another beer first?’

  I nodded and, as he took the empties to the kitchen, I realized I was enjoying myself. I’d never spoken this openly about my writing or my counting with Rory. We hadn’t bickered. No awkward silences either. The only weirdness was being overlooked by the cardboard cut-out of Wally.

  He brought back another two bottles and handed me one before sitting. I took it and waited for him to speak.

  ‘So I’m Norris’s nephew but I don’t actually know my dad, his brother.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Never knew him. He walked out when I was born, moved to Australia. Mum brought me up by herself. Well, with help from Norris. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but he’s pretty useless with money?’

  I smiled and nodded.

  ‘He paid for a lot of stuff which I don’t think he could really afford. Mum’s car. Holidays. And he gave me my first camera when I was thirteen.’

  ‘It’s weird, I’ve worked with him for five years and never knew any of this.’

  Zach shrugged. ‘He’s private about it. I think he’s ashamed of his own brother and felt like he had to make up for him.’

  ‘And now you’re paying it back?’

  ‘Trying to, if we can keep this place going,’ he said, looking around us.

  ‘But hang on, why the tattoo? You said your mum’s a teacher?’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘She’s an Englis
h teacher and used to read me the classics when I was younger. Perseus was always my favourite because he has a happy ending, unlike most of the others who are killed by a ten-headed lion or murdered by their own family. And he ends up in the sky, the Perseus constellation.’

  ‘You know your Greeks,’ I said, smiling. I felt guilty at making so many assumptions about Zach – dishevelled, coffee-throwing Zach – that were unfair.

  ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of them. But I like your story. The caterpillar. I can see it. Can imagine it on the page, all those little shoes.’

  ‘Can you actually? It’s no Greek tragedy but I think it’s kind of sweet.’

  ‘You shown it to anyone?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Like an agent?’

  I shook my head quickly. ‘Uh-uh. No way. It’s not good enough.’

  ‘I can ask mine if you like? He’s a photography agent but they have a literary department.’

  I screwed my eyes shut at the very idea.

  ‘Come on, you big wimp. What’s the point in hiding it if you want to get it published? I can just ask if anyone wants to have a look at it. No pressure.’

  ‘What if they hate it?’ I asked, opening one eye to squint at him.

  ‘Then you show someone else. J.K. Rowling sent Harry Potter and Hedwig to loads of agents before someone accepted it.’

  ‘I’m not sure Curtis the counting caterpillar has as much appeal as Harry.’

  Zach spread his hands in front of him. ‘How do you know if you don’t put it out there?’

  ‘All right. Maybe, thank you.’

  ‘You’re very welcome.’

  ‘What do you want to do with photography then?’

  He shrugged. ‘Travel, let it take me places. Do a trip, sell a few pictures, fund another trip.’

  ‘Where’s the best place you’ve been?’

  Zach lifted his bottle to his mouth as he thought. ‘There’s a town in northern India called Leh. Right up in the Himalayas. One of the most dangerous airports to fly into in the world.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Imagine landing in a salad bowl…’ He raised his hand flat in the air and swooped it in front of him. ‘There are mountains all around so the pilot has to dive and stop quickly because the runway’s so short, and the wind gets up every afternoon so you can only land in the morning. It feels like you’re riding a leaf.’