Sophia Money-Coutts - The Wish List

‘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’.

‘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.