Occasionally I worried such a quiet, unambitious life meant I’d be alone for ever, never brave enough to fall in love or go abroad. The furthest I’d ever travelled was to my grandmother’s in France, which was ironic considering my parents were keen explorers who met in India. Mum had been an idealistic 23-year-old who taught English at a school in a Mumbai suburb, and lived in a small apartment nearby where she was woken in the morning by monkeys shrieking on her balcony. I’d always held on to the idea of those noisy monkeys, one of the only stories I could remember her telling me.
Dad was living in the city at the same time, a student writing his dissertation on dynastic Indian politics. This topic had apparently acted as an aphrodisiac on Mum, who’d met him one evening when he was invited over to dinner by her flatmate. That was that. They became inseparable, until the car crash in London eight years later. The crash that rocketed into our lives like a comet and changed everything. That was when I realized change was bad. So, the same clothes; the same lunch; every Monday, by and large, the same as the previous Monday, and the Monday before that. If life stayed the same, life was safe.
That morning, I ate my toast while listening to the radio – a Cabinet minister had been forced to apologize for making a joke about vegans – and ushered Marmalade into the garden.
Mia left for work first. She worked for a fashion PR company, quite senior now, and was responsible for telling women that they should wear crochet and tartan this season and that animal print was out. She’d given up on me because I refused to wear anything other than my self-imposed navy uniform to the shop. Ruby would generally lie in bed until midday, depending on whether she had a casting, then leave a trail of mugs and milky cereal bowls around the house which I put in the dishwasher every evening since, by then, she was always out.
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